Bumper Crop

I think I have mentioned that this autumn there has been a massive bumper crop of acorns. Underneath some of the oak trees the ground is carpeted with them - and it's a crunchy, lumpy carpet. You would think that this would have the squirrels doing ecstatic dances of joy, but for some reason squirrels have been scarce. Squirrels are not the only animals that eat acorns, though - I spotted a couple of deer on the driveway the other day, and they were probably dining on acorns before I inadvertently scared them away. And there are chipmunks:

 There are a lot of chipmunks running around the backyard these days. One of the funny things about chipmunks is, of course, the way they stuff their cheeks full of food, which before this autumn I had only ever seen in person once in my life, out of all the times I had seen chipmunks. But lately, it's a pretty common sight. I don't think it takes a lot of acorns to fill a chipmunk's cheeks. This one doesn't seem to have quite enough room for what it's got in there...

 This chipmunk was hiding under the rock there, waiting for me to go away, and every once it a while it would come out to check if I was still there. It would look at me, wait a moment, and then dive back under the rock. I posted two pictures of it because if you click back and forth between the two you can have fun with Blog-imation, our low budget form of animation here on The Bugs in the Backyard Blog.

 Also, because it's unbelievably cute, but I obviously couldn't get very close to it, here's the same pictures zoomed in.

The Blog-imation doesn't work so well with these, because I didn't crop them the same.

I have 2 Backyard Bugs of the Day today, just because.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #1:

 A beautiful hopper of some kind.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #2:

 I think this is something called a moth fly, which is a fly, not a moth. It is also unbelievably small. Maybe 1 millimeter. It was so small that the only reason I saw it at all was because it was moving, and once it stopped, I had to just try to remember what crevice in the tree bark it had gone into, because I couldn't see it to point the camera at it. So here it is. I am not sure if that is another tiny bug below it or not...

Random Bugs:

 Fly

The things captured by the orb weaver spider (there's no spider in the picture, so I hope it's okay I didn't put this under Arachnid Appreciation).

The swarms of those flies that I think are called March flies but should really be called November flies were out in even greater numbers today:

 It's getting crowded.

 More tussling.

So much swarming...

 In the same spider web as above. It was still alive and struggling to get out when I took this picture.

 Wonky wing

 Propagating the species. Actually, I am not sure if this is the same species...

 Arachnid Appreciation:
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.